Gradually came that mental eclaircissement which produced the editor, the magazinist, the translator of Strauss. The friendship with the Brays more than any one thing marks the external cause of this awakening: but it was latent, this response to the world of thought and of scholarship, and certain to be called out sooner or later. Our chief interest in it is due to the query how much it ministered to her coming career as creative author of fiction. George Eliot at this period looked perilously like a Blue Stocking. The range and variety of her reading and the severely intellectual nature of her pursuits justify the assertion. Was this well for the novelist? The reply might be a paradox: yes and no. This learning imparted to Eliot's works a breadth of vision that is tonic and wins the respect of the judicious. It helps her to escape from that bane of the woman novelist--excessive sentiment without intellectual orientation. But, on the other hand, there are times when she appears to be writing a polemic, not a novel: when the tone becomes didactic, the movement heavy--when the work seems self-conscious and over-intellectualized. Nor can it be denied that this tendency grew on Eliot, to the injury of her latest work. There is a simple kind of exhortation in the "Clerical Scenes," but it disappears in the earliest novels, only to reappear in stories like "Daniel Deronda." Any and all culture that comes to a large, original nature (and such was Eliot's) should be for the good of the literary product: learning in the narrower, more technical sense, is perhaps likely to do harm. Here and there there is a reminder of the critic-reviewer in her fiction. George Eliot's intellectual development during her last years widened her work and strengthened her comprehensive grasp of life. She gained in interpretation thereby. There will, however, always be those who hold that it would have been better for her reputation had she written nothing after "Middlemarch," or even after "Felix Holt." Those who object on principle to her agnosticism, would also add that the negative nature of her philosophy, her lack of what is called definite religious convictions, had its share in injuring materially her maturest fiction. The vitality or charm of a novel, however, is not necessarily impaired because the author holds such views. It is more pertinent to take the books as they are, in chronologic order, to point out so far as possible their particular merits.